Gift cards, vouchers and coupons

Where

Financials → Financial Transactions → Gift Cards

Plan

Growth and above

Permission

Accounting → Promotion

Three things that look similar and are not.

	Gift card	Voucher	Coupon
What it is	Money on a card	Credit you gave them	A price cut
Has a balance?	Yes, reloadable	Yes, but cannot be topped up	No
At the till it is	A payment method	A payment method	A discount code
On your books	Money you owe them	Money you owe them	Nothing

The plain rule: gift card = the customer paid you up front. Voucher = you gave them credit, as goodwill or for a return. Coupon = a discount. The first two are debts; the third never is.

All of these live under Financials → Financial Transactions, even though they are really marketing tools. There is no Promotions menu.

How to issue a gift card

1. Go to Financials → Financial Transactions → Gift Cards and click New gift card.
2. Leave Card number blank to have one generated, or type the number printed on a physical card.
3. Enter the Initial amount. This cannot be changed later.
4. Optionally attach a Customer, and fill in the Recipient name, Recipient email, Issue date and Expiry date.
5. Leave Status as Active and click Save.

Take the money first — this screen does not

Creating a card here puts no money in your drawer and posts nothing to your accounts. It just brings the card into existence with a balance on it.

Ring the sale first — a “Gift card” service line at the till for the same amount — and only then issue the card. Nothing links the two, so if you forget, you have handed out value you were never paid for and your books will never show it.

How to top up a card

Open the card’s row menu and click Load / adjust. Choose Reload, Refund or Adjustment, enter the Amount, and save.

Vouchers have no equivalent — a voucher balance cannot be corrected or topped up once issued.

How to check a card’s balance

Go to Gift Cards and type the card number into the search box. The Balance column is what is left.

Not possible on a phone

The mobile view shows the first fifty cards as a list with no search box, so you cannot look a card up by number. Use a computer.

How to take a gift card as payment

1. Ring the sale as normal.
2. In the Payments area set a payment row’s Method to Gift card.
3. Type the Gift card number. The amount fills in with what is still owed — trim it for a part payment.
4. Complete the sale.

The card is checked the moment you enter it — you are told if it is not found, expired, cancelled, or short of the amount. The balance is only actually taken when the sale completes, so a held sale never burns a card.

Vouchers work identically: set the Method to Voucher and enter the Voucher code.

Gift cards cannot be taken offline

The code has to be checked against the server. With no connection the tender is refused.

How to create a coupon code

For “give this customer code SAVE10 for 10% off”.

1. Go to Financials → Financial Transactions → Coupons and click New coupon.
2. Type the Code — this is what the cashier types — and a Name.
3. Pick the Discount type, Percentage or Fixed amount, and enter the Value.
4. Optionally set Min. purchase, Max. discount, Max. total uses, Max. per customer, and the Valid from and Valid to dates.
5. Leave Status as Active and save.

Cashiers apply it from More options → Coupon code → Apply. See Selling at the till.

Every coupon you create works on anything, for anyone

The system can restrict a coupon to particular products, categories or customers — but the form has no fields for any of that. A coupon you create by hand applies to the whole basket and can be used by any customer who learns the code.

Your only real controls are Min. purchase, the usage limits and the dates. Set the usage caps.

How to create an automatic discount

For “10% off all shampoo this week” with no code at all.

1. Go to Financials → Financial Transactions → Discounts and click New discount.
2. Type a Name, pick the Type — Flat, Graduated or Range — and the Level: All, Product, Category, Brand or Customer.
3. Enter the Value and choose Amount or Percentage.
4. Set Min. amount or Min. quantity, and the Start date and End date.
5. Use the row of seven day chips to limit it to certain days of the week.
6. Under Applies to, click Add target to choose what it covers. Exclusions works the same way.
7. Save.

Cashiers do nothing — the server applies it to every matching basket automatically.

Only three target types have a proper picker

Product, Customer and Branch give you a searchable list. Category, Brand, Product variant and Loyalty tier instead give you a bare Entity ID box expecting a long internal identifier typed by hand.

In practice you can only build discounts targeted at products, customers or branches.

Referral programs

You can set up a referral program, hand out codes, and have the system work out who earned what — a cashier enters the code under More options → Referral, and when a new customer’s first purchase completes, the reward is calculated and recorded.

The reward is never actually paid

Marking a redemption Rewarded records the status and the amount and does nothing else. No gift card is issued, no store credit is created, and nothing reaches your accounts — even though the program’s Reward type dropdown offers “Gift card credit” and “Store credit”.

Treat Referral redemptions as a to-do list: pay the referrer yourself by issuing a gift card or voucher, then come back and mark it Rewarded.

Three more things to know:

• A referral that does not qualify fails silently. A mistyped code, a returning customer, or a basket under the minimum produces no message anywhere. Unlike a coupon, the till gives no verdict on a referral code.
• The Share button shares nothing. It increments a counter and says “Share recorded”. No link is made, nothing is copied, no message is sent.
• Payout reference only accepts an internal identifier, not a cheque or card number.

Intercompany transfers

For recording value moving between two of your companies. It is a register only — approving a transfer posts nothing to your accounts, and the code says as much. If you need it in the books, write a journal entry as well.

It is the one screen in this group that works offline.

Related

• Selling at the till
• Setting up your books